Ahead of the upcoming festive season and ‘Big Billion Days’, Flipkart onboarded an additional 1 lakh kiranas in the last year, taking the total partner count to over 2 lakh across the country. 

Flipkart’s Kirana Delivery programme is said to currently deliver over 30 per cent of its 100 million deliveries a month. Launched in 2019, Flipkart’s Kirana Delivery Programme helps onboard local general trade stores, or kiranas, as delivery partners based on their availability, storage space at the store and willingness to have an additional source of income.

Having started with 27,000 kirana partners in the first year, the programme said, it has been doubling its onboarding count year-on-year—50,000 partners in 2020 to 1 lakh in 2021, and over 2 lakh this year. This scaling of kirana network will enable Flipkart customers across the country—including metros, tier-2 and 3 cities, and even in rural India—to have their products delivered and fulfill their festive requirements while also becoming an additional source of income for kirana partners. 

Huge participation from N-E

As preparations for the festive season scale up, States including West Bengal (27,000+), Bihar (23,000+), Uttar Pradesh (20,000+), Maharashtra (17,000+) and Tamil Nadu (14,000+) have witnessed the highest onboarding of kiranas. While states including Puducherry and Jammu & Kashmir too, saw increased onboarding by Kirana partners, it is Northeastern states that witnessed a significant jump in participation with nearly 15,000 partner stores across Tripura, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh coming onboard, creating a significant 5X growth from 2020.

Bonuses, incentives

This year, Flipkart has introduced additional incentives for kirana partners such as guaranteed payment and bonuses, referral incentives and a host of other benefits including personal accident policy of ₹5 lakh.

Hemant Badri, Senior Vice-President, Supply Chain at the Flipkart Group, said, “As a homegrown e-commerce marketplace, Flipkart is committed to creating a shared value for all ecosystem partners and has rolled out various initiatives over the years to further assimilate them into our value chain. In this endeavour, our Kirana Delivery Programme has been one of the most impactful initiatives with over 2 lakh kirana partners joining hands with Flipkart. This programme will enable us to seamlessly fulfill customers’ evolving requirements during the upcoming annual festive extravaganza—the Big Billion Days—with further expansion of the programme across the nook and corner of the country. We are also committed to bringing prosperity for our kirana partners and their commitment towards the programme has further enabled us to expand our delivery offerings to multiple products including high value items such as mobile phones, electronics and others.”

Training, too

The company has also established a digital registration process which entails submitting an online application along with necessary documents and after thorough verification, the selected kiranas are inducted into the programme and trained in the various nuances of delivery and customer management, in addition to use of the app-based dashboards and digital payments.

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